Wednesday, September 10, 2008

(this guide shows you how to make animated sprays for counter strike source. team fortress 2. and almost all source engine games)

Expressing your individuality in counter strike source and other source engine games can be hard especially if you’re a noob While running and gunning your way through fps games like Counter-Strike: Source or Team Fortress 2 it’s not hard to get lost in the crowd. But leaving your mark on the css or tf2 server is easy. moving Animated sprays are a great way for you to tell your enemy that, not only have they been owned and pwned, but that you're the one that shot them Custom moving animated sprays only for the most elite pubbers in the days of Counter-Strike 1.6, but now that the Source engine is here that has all changed. So here is a quick and easy way to make your own moving animated spray and let the lolcats run wild

What You Will Need

Adobe Photoshop. or another image editor like gimp.
but this guide is primarily for Adobe PhotoShop.

a source game like css or tf2 or any source game for the spray to work

The hardest part of making your own animated spray is deciding what picture or pictures to use. The choice is harder then you think, as the end result represents both your own unique style, and your declaration of manliness whenever you choose to use it. The choice can either be easy or very very hard.

Make sure that the background contents are transparent otherwise when you load up your spray online there will be a big ugly white background

For the ease of simplicity, we've used a lolcat for our sample spray. The images are popular on the Internet, and sometimes very funny. Once you’ve chosen your picture, you'll want to place it on a transparent background using Photoshop. Open the original image, then press ctrl+a to select the entire image, press ctrl+c to copy it, and create a new canvas by pressing ctrl+n. The new canvas will already be the exact same size as the image on your clipboard, so you can simply paste it by pressing ctrl+v. It's a good idea to make a backup save of your image now. If you mess anything up, you'll be able to revert your changes much more easily if you have a backup.
Cut out the area of the picture that you want to be transparent by selecting it with the lasso tool, then pressing delete. Don’t worry about getting rid of everything at once, just remove unwanted background one chunk at a time. For bits of the image that are the same color, you can use the magic wand tool. This lets you select adjoining pixels that are the same color quickly and easily. When you've clipped out all the of the background that you want to, for each of the images you'll use in your spray, re size the image to 128 pixels wide using the Image Size panel (ctrl+alt+i), and move on to the next step.

Step 2: Create the backbone of your custom spray

Put your files side by side and make sure that they’re what you want other players to see. For me, this is right on the money.

Once you’ve got your picture or pictures clipped, open them up side-by-side in Photoshop. This is a good time to input any text that you would like in your animated spray. With the separate frames next to each other it’ll be easy to see exactly what your finished product will look like in-game. The one thing you can't do is create too many frames--due to the Source engine's 120KB spray file size limit, you more then likely will not be able to create more than five frames. Make sure everything looks the way you like it to and save the finished 128x128 images in one directory with names that alphabetize into the proper order for the frames

1 image.jpg, 2 image.jpg, etc.

Step 3 conversion

VTFEdit's import process asks you all sorts of scary questions. Fortunately, you can just skip over them by pressing OK.

Now that all of your images are properly sized, you're almost ready to create the spray. Open up VTFEdit, and go to File -> Import. Control-click each of the images you want to use, and click OK. Select the default options on the Import screen, and wait while your images are converted. To get an insanely high-speed preview of your spray, you can go to the Image tab and press Play. If everything looks right, you can go to the Info tab and make sure that the overall size of the spray is less than 120KB. Then save the file in c:/Program Files/Steam/steamapps//team fortress 2/tf/materials/VGUI/logos for Team Fortress 2, or your c:/Program Files/Steam/steamapps//counter-strike source/cstrike/materials/VGUI/logos folder. Once you've saved the file, go to the Tools menu and click Create VMT file, then save the resulting file to the same folder.

step 4 all done

all done you should be proud of yourself

Now, your files should be in order, and you can open up css or tf2 or other source games and enjoy your spray you made all by yourself. From the game's main menu, go to the options menu, and select the Multiplayer tab. Your new spray should be available in the drop-down list, for you to select it. Before you go to your favorite pub server, you will want to test your spray in a private place, so create a server and make sure it works properly there. If you make adjustments to the spray, you'll need to disconnect and reconnect to the server in order to see any changes. Once you are happy with the way the spray is working, open up your game and get killing and spraying

DO NOT WANT animated spray? (LOLCAT talk)

don't worry Stop yourself after you’ve cut out your picture and save it as a targa (.tga) Size doesn’t matter, so just place it somewhere that it’ll be found easily and import it from Counter-Strike: Source or Team Fortress 2’s or any source games. in game menu.